Best gift for your techie friends: a coder’s education

Here’s a great idea for the wannapreneurs, “social media experts,” and Internet enthusiasts on your list: a month or two of coding lessons. Takes the BS right out of ‘em.

Code School, one of a plethora of learn-to-code sites and services, is running a holiday special: One month of coding is just $25, or you could buy three months for $50 or half a year for $100. The whole thing is set up for you to give the membership as a gift; special holiday-themed Code School vouchers are sent via mail to your recipient.

As the company puts it, “Video games can entertain you and sweaters can keep you warm, but Code School keeps you learning straight through the holidays!”

Granted, options such as Codecademy are free of charge year-round, but it’s hard to give a free “gift” with any dignity — and your code-ignorant fake-gift recipient won’t have the necessary feelings of guilt to prod him or her into actually using the gift and learning a thing or two about JavaScript.

Code School’s curriculum consists of video lessons, coding challenges, and screencasts. Courses are game-like and cover such topics as HTML, CSS, iOS, and basics for Ruby/Rails. For those who’ve previously gotten their feet wet with code, there are courses on Node.js, jQuery, Git, Backbone, and more. Progress for each course gets saved to a report card, and learners earn badges along the way.